


A Day Like That

by azephirin



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Best Friends, F/M, First Time, High School, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, POV Original Character, Pre-Canon, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-19
Updated: 2010-03-19
Packaged: 2017-10-08 03:34:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/72275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is something she doesn't know how to ask.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Day Like That

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** secondary character death, implication of past physical abuse of a child
> 
> **Notes:** Also for my [](http://community.livejournal.com/100_women/profile)[**100_women**](http://community.livejournal.com/100_women/) [table](http://azephirin.livejournal.com/74095.html) prompt "comfort." Thanks to [](http://ninhursag.livejournal.com/profile)[**ninhursag**](http://ninhursag.livejournal.com/) for letting me spam her with the first parts of this story. Initial inspiration from [this picture](http://i170.photobucket.com/albums/u245/azephirin/ni3V7mQi3muo5ssluCTHnENCo1_1280.jpg) (worksafe). This story can be read as AU or not, whichever the reader prefers.

Asha's mom comms her from the shipyard to tell her. She doesn't like Jim, but she has a heart: "Is he OK?"

Asha has no idea.

Jim wasn't at school today, though that in itself means nothing. It's warm enough that he could have gone down to the river to swim and stayed there all day; he might be in his garage working on the bike; he might have taken off this morning for Omaha and spent the afternoon in the Creighton University library, which he randomly does sometimes. He could be anywhere, have been absent for any reason.

But usually he invites her along, even if she always says no when it's a school day.

"I don't know, Mom," Asha says. "I think I should go over there."

Asha's mom thinks Jim's a bad influence, which is ridiculous because Asha's carried the same 4.0 since the first semester of her freshman year—and, for that matter, so has Jim. But he skips school and rides a motorcycle and wears a leather jacket, and so therefore he is a bad influence. When Asha was sixteen, her mother forbade her from associating with Jim Kirk; when Asha was seventeen, her mother complained about it; now she is eighteen, a senior in high school and not long for Riverside, and it goes unspoken between them that Asha will see Jim when she wants to, and they won't discuss it.

"Yes," her mom agrees, and Asha almost drops the comm unit in surprise. "Maybe you should."

+||+||+

 

Sometimes it's better not to let Jim know what you're planning, and so Asha doesn't comm or even text before she heads over to the Kirks' old farmhouse. It's been there forever: Asha's grandfather went to Riverside High with Tiberius Kirk, and still tells stories about the graduation party at the homestead. It's a big place, and from what Asha's grandfather says, it used to be full of Kirks, all blond and blue-eyed and the smartest people in town, but it's so big and empty now that it feels ghostly. Everybody knows what happened to George, and Winona's always gone (and now she'll always be gone), and Sam took off back when Asha and Jim were in middle school, and Winona divorced Frank after he and the law had a disagreement over what constituted appropriate discipline for Jim (and Frank doesn't know that he's a dead man if he ever crosses the Riverside city limits again, but Asha can fire a phaser and she knows), and Sam still didn't come back, and now Winona's dead, and it's just Jim in that big old rambly house that creaks with memories and ghosts.

Asha knocks on the door.

There's no answer, but Jim programmed her into the print reader when they were twelve, and she lets herself in. The lights are on, which says that he must be around somewhere—

"What the hell are you doing here?" He's standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

"I came to see if you were OK."

He leans against the doorframe, lazy and unconcerned to anyone who hasn't known him all his life. "Sure. Why wouldn't I be?"

"Don't bullshit me, Jim. My mom told me."

They stare at each other for several tense, silent moments, until finally Jim says, eyes elsewhere, "I'm fine."

_Bullshit_, Asha thinks, again, but this time she doesn't say it.

She thinks back to when her father died, when she was ten—Iverson's Disease, diagnosed long before she was born. There had been the funeral, of course, and then a reception at their house, and mostly what Asha remembers is a bunch of grown-ups wanting to hug her and tell her they were sorry. Finally she'd locked the door to her room and hidden in her closet, just her and her cat, Lulu, back where it was quiet.

But no lock has ever been any kind of barrier for Jim, of course, and he'd squashed himself into the space between Asha and the wall, and even though neither of them said anything, Asha had discovered that it was really nice not to be alone.

Which is, she thinks, what Jim needs, too. Except that he doesn't know how to ask for it, and there's no good way to offer.

Instead, Asha says the next thing that comes to mind, which is, "Let me fix you something to eat."

If nothing else, this gives Jim something to attack. "So, what, food's going to fix the part where my mom's dead?"

"No," she snaps back, "but it'll fix the part where you don't eat when left to your own devices."

He laughs, horribly. "That doesn't change whether or not my mom's breathing."

"Yeah." Asha turns and opens the fridger. "I know."

Jim takes one long step across the kitchen and slams the fridger door shut. His knuckles, wrapped around the handle, are white, and his eyes are wild, like an out-of-control racehorse. It's another impasse—this whole situation is one big impasse, Asha thinks, and she doesn't know how to break it. She reaches out and puts her hand over his, and meets his eyes as evenly as she can.

He pushes her against the door and kisses her hard, burying his hands in her hair. She gasps, starts—it's so much to take in at once. The pain is quick and sharp when he pulls at her hair; his lips, though, are full and soft, his tongue agile; his body is warm against hers, wiry and strong, solid in a way that she's tried not to let herself imagine over the years. It's the one boundary they've never crossed, but now here they are, tangled up in each other on the day Winona Kirk died, and it's not exactly how Asha might have imagined it, but if he needs this like she needed him to sit next to her in the closet and pet Lulu, then OK. She'd pay a higher price than this for him.

Jim sucks at the pulse point underneath her jaw, and she shudders; his mouth makes its way down as his hands make their way up, sliding underneath her T-shirt and onto skin. Asha lets that be permission, and she pushes up his shirt and touches him too. His skin is smooth, soft under her palms but hard over bone and muscle, and she's seen it before—you can't be friends with somebody since kindergarten and not see them without their clothes on a few times—but it's a whole different thing to have her hands on it.

Then his fingers find her nipples, and she shudders, stifling her moan against his shoulder.

Asha raises her arms, and Jim pulls her shirt free; she strips him of his, too, and having him suddenly bare against her is new, shocking, wonderful. He fumbles between her shoulder blades, and she steps forward, pushing him gently back, to take off her bra herself. As soon as it's gone, he devours her again, hands and mouth, and by silent consensus they start making their way out of the kitchen and toward the living room, and the old leather couch.

She pulls him down on top of her, and that, too, is breath-stealingly good: Her thighs fall open to make room for him, and when he thrusts down against her (it's unconscious, she thinks, his muscles moving from a memory older than either of them), she rises to meet him. He's hard, and it's sexy and scandalous but also satisfying to feel the shape of Jim's cock against her, to know that the blood and desire is all for her. Another moan wants to surface, and she smothers it with a bite to the point of his shoulder as his lips begin to explore her throat again—

He's shaking.

Asha's not at her steadiest either, but she can feel him trembling, and something about it feels wrong. This is something else she doesn't know how to ask: _I'll give you whatever you want, but is this really what you want?_ Jim's breath is uneven, but so is hers—if it weren't, Asha thinks, they've been doing everything wrong. There's a question here that needs to be asked, but Asha knows that Jim won't answer in words.

She shifts position to cradle the nape of his neck with one hand while she runs the other, lightly, up and down his spine. Up and down, up and down, slow, soothing, and let him take that as he will: If he wants to keep going, wants to follow his trail of kisses down her throat to its natural conclusion at her breasts, she'll close her eyes and bite back her cries as his tongue circles her nipples, but if not—

He collapses, as suddenly and abruptly as a bridge that has lost its supports. He presses his face into the curve of her shoulder, and he's still shaking. She holds him as best she can, one arm across his back, the other hand stroking his hair, gathering him against her. She doesn't feel tears, and doesn't hear any evidence of them either, just his quick, sharp, uneven breaths. Asha presses her cheek to his and thinks things Jim's no good at hearing: _I love you; I won't leave you; I'll keep you safe_. She wishes she could communicate through touch like Vulcans can—if Jim won't hear the words, at least he could feel them and know them. Instead all she can do is kiss his temple and hold him as tightly as she can.

Afternoon turns to evening as they lie together. Jim dozes, and Asha does too. Jim's stomach growls at one point, but he doesn't move to get up, and so Asha doesn't either—this seems more important right now. She can bug him to eat later. They drift off again—

And when they hear the front door open, they have time only for the exchange of mutually horrified glances before Sam Kirk is standing in the doorway, looking just as appalled. He immediately mutters something about brain bleach, and disappears upstairs.

"Oh my fucking God." Jim drops his head back onto Asha's chest. "I didn't think this day could get any worse."

"At least we're not naked," Asha points out.

"More's the pity," Jim says under his breath, then immediately looks like he wishes he could take it back. "I mean. Just. Um." He starts to roll away from her.

With an angled leg and all the strength in both arms, Asha keeps him in place. "Jim. Wait. I didn't— I wanted this." She takes a breath and says in a rush, "I did for a long time. But you don't have to— I mean— It's OK if it's just—"

He's blushing, but he's also smiling—just a little, but just enough to look like himself—when he turns back to her. "I did too," he says. "For a long time."

"So maybe on another day…" Asha starts, but trails off.

"A day when…nothing bad happens," Jim adds.

"A day like that," Asha agrees, and wishes again that she were Vulcan.

She's thinking they should get up, find their shirts (back in the kitchen), and put them on, but Jim presses his face back to her shoulder and says, not completely clearly, "Sam's going to want me to go back with him."

"To Pasadena?" Sam's at CalTech, a senior now, starting his PhD in biology next year.

Jim makes a face. "Yeah. Whatever the hell I'd do there."

"You don't have to make up your mind today," Asha says. "Nobody's going to expect you to."

"I'm eighteen," Jim says. "I could just say here."

_Oh hell no you can't,_ Asha thinks. "Sure," she says. "You can stay with Mom and me."

Jim stares for a second, then recovers with, "Your mom hates me."

"She'll get over it. But you're not staying in this house by yourself."

"I'm eighteen," Jim repeats, a little blustery now. "I can do whatever I want."

Asha pats him on the back. "Of course you can. And I'm moving in with you." He stares again, and this time doesn't come up with a response. "You don't get it, Jim," she goes on after a moment. "I'm not leaving you. That's not how this works."

His arms tighten around her. "OK," he whispers. "Good."


End file.
